Thomas Lawrence: The new romantic – review

Thomas Lawrence was a master of Regency portraiture who changed the way women were depicted in art. But he has long been mocked as a chocolate box sentimentalist. His ebullient work is due a reassessment, says Richard Holmes

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) belongs to what was once fondly called the "golden age" of British portrait painting – the age of Gainsborough, Northcote, Hoppner, Beechey and Reynolds. Yet his reputation, unlike theirs, has fluctuated in a remarkable way. Sometimes he has been regarded as the dazzling, bravura master of Regency portraiture; at others as a brash and sentimental commercial artist – even as a chocolate box painter. Lawrence's whole life, as well as his art, has long presented this intriguing dilemma. Now, at last, comes the chance for a reassessment.

Almost the exact contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lawrence was, like them, a "natural genius from the provinces", although, unlike them, he soon learned to conceal this in gentlemanly mannerisms. Indeed, he was always forced to be something of an actor. He was born in Bristol in April 1769, the son of a tavern-keeper, and grew up at his father's celebrated coaching inn, the Black Bear, on the Devizes road in Wiltshire. A beautiful and gifted child, he was considered a prodigy by his parents, able to recite Paradise Lost and dash off astonishing drawings by the age of five. His instinctive skill as a draughtsman, catching "likenesses" of his father's customers, especially the fashionable female ones, was soon remarked on by influential visitors, such as the novelist Fanny Burney. So too was his precocious ability to charm and seduce. By the time Lawrence was 10, his father was already charging for the boy's drawings and pastels.

Keen to exploit his gifts, his parents took him first to Oxford and then to Bath, where characteristically he caught the attention of both the actress Sarah Siddons and the Duchess of Devonshire. He was then launched in London, from rooms in Piccadilly, at the age of 17. Here Lawrence met the approval of the ageing Joshua Reynolds, and was briefly enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools. From then on Lawrence's professional success was meteoric. He was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 25, made a baronet in his mid-40s, and elected president of the Royal Academy in 1820, at the age of 51. His earliest pastel portraits at the Black Bear Inn had been sold for half a guinea. Some of his last portraits in oils went for 900 each.

Lawrence's genius first showed in his draughtsmanship. From the very beginning he was a brilliant delineator of the human face in chalk, crayon, pencil or pastel. His drawings are confident, psychologically acute, often witty and even mischievous. Consider his exquisite drawing of his early friend and mentor Mary Hamilton and her amazing Bo Peep hat. It was executed by Lawrence in 1789, at the age of 19, when he was first starting to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Part fashion plate and part romantic mood study, it has memorable impact. To the fine, intricate mesh of black chalk, he has added flushed highlights in red, like too much excitement rising into her cheeks. As with so much of Lawrence's best work, it is deliberately theatrical, dressy and provocative. Mary's pose is self-conscious, but refreshingly sexy. Lawrence has begun to create a new species of woman.

For his first 15 years in London, between 1790 and 1805, Lawrence's portraits were continuously prominent at the Royal Academy exhibitions. He plunged into the Regency world of aristocracy, fashion and theatre, but also found time for a few striking pieces of political reportage, such as his dramatic drawing of the young radical Thomas Holcroft and his supporter, the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, at the treason trials in the Old Bailey in 1794. Again, Lawrence has chosen an intensely theatrical moment: Holcroft – on a capital charge – has just been found not guilty. Male friendship in adversity had great emotional significance for Lawrence, and the double portrait became a favourite motif.

For the young women of the time, Lawrence's sense of Romantic style and flamboyance often outran the tastes of even the most fashionable. The dazzling, airy portrait of the 30-year-old actress Elizabeth Farren announced his triumphant arrival at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1790. Her seductive figure is offset by a provocative display of textures: muslin, fur, satin and silk, and above all perhaps her limp, leather chamois gloves. Each is rendered with sharp, voluptuous appreciation. At first it provoked only mocking reproach from its subject. Lawrence had actually made Farren far too thin. "You might blow it away," she groaned to him, "in short you must make it a little fatter, at all events diminish the bend you are so attached to, even if it make the picture look ill." Despite these unconvincing protests, Farren was shortly to become Lady Derby, for which Lawrence doubtless took not a little credit.

During these same momentous years, following the French revolution and the declaration of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, Lawrence also identified a new, swaggering masculine style emerging among the young men of the regency. Significantly it was "Byronic", some 10 years before Byron actually adopted it himself. Dark, dandyish, dashing, brooding – it combined an extraordinary mixture of male arrogance and almost feminine beauty, emphasised by vivid clothes, peacock hairstyles and smouldering glances.

Lawrence was painting his own generation, and effectively bringing it on to the stage of history. He supplied them with stormy or melodramatic backgrounds, dashed in with fast, free brushstrokes, as if liberating them from an old world of conventions. In contrast with the previous generation of artists – the smoothness of Reynolds, or the feather-light touch of Gainsborough – he rendered their clothes with thickly applied paint, strongly contrasted colours, and glittering, almost metallic, highlights. With these techniques, Lawrence expressed a new age of patriotism, flamboyance and bold individuality.

For all the extravagance of his portraiture, Lawrence's own life appeared – on the surface at least – curiously restrained. He repeatedly said he never bet on cards, never gambled on horses, never got drunk with friends (all proper regency male pastimes). Instead, he claimed his favourite reading was Jane Austen, and his most extreme sport was billiards. He never married. Yet he was handsome, flirtatious and charming to a perilous degree. His great friend and confidant, the painter and diarist Joseph Farington, bluntly called him "a male coquet". But this does not seem quite to explain the case. An anonymous female admirer wrote more perceptively: "He could not write a common answer to a dinner invitation without it assuming the tone of a billet-doux. The very commonest conversation was held in that soft, low whisper, and with that tone of deference and interest, which are so unusual, and so calculated to please."

It is true that Lawrence was the subject of endless gossip, his name linked romantically with many of his female sitters, the Duchess of Devonshire, Sarah Siddons (and both her daughters), the diarist Mrs Papendiek, the Honourable Miss Upton, the unhappy Queen Caroline (he had to sign a legal deposition disclaiming adulterous opportunity before her trial for divorce in Parliament), the ingénue Fanny Kemble and, most problematic of all, with the beautiful Isabella Wolff (another divorcée). Wolff may indeed have been his mistress, and her stunning silvery portrait – the most Sibylline he ever painted – conveniently took Lawrence 15 years to complete.

Lawrence met Wolff in 1803, after his long entanglement with the two Siddons girls (about which André Maurois wrote an entire novel, shrewdly suggesting Lawrence was not really in love with them at all, but was in thrall to their mother). His extensive, gossipy correspondence with Wolff was subsequently censored by his first biographer. An odd, amorous fragment from a letter written in Rome in June 1819 has survived. It gives a glimpse of Lawrence's billet-doux style. "My Bed Room Window is so small that only one Person can conveniently look out of it, but it looks over St Peter's . . . and as sweet Evening closes I often squeeze you into it, though it does hurt you a little by holding your arm so closely within mine." Isabella was safely in London at the time.

Another mystery was his finances. Despite his ever-increasing fees, Lawrence remained in debt for his whole life. By 1807 his bankers, Coutts, reckoned he owed some £20,000. Exactly what he spent his money on remains an enigma. Perhaps it was his collection of Old Masters – eventually sold off to pay his creditors on his death.

Lawrence had an acute and generous eye for fellow artists, and his letters show the encouragement and support that he gave to JMW Turner, Richard Parkes Bonington, the naturalist Audubon and William Blake. In fact Lawrence was one of the very few contemporaries who praised and actually purchased a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He also said Blake's The Wise and Foolish Virgins was his "favourite drawing", and kept it on a special table. His studios were always ultra-fashionable. His first, at 41 Jermyn Street, is now occupied by the tradesman's entrance of Fortnum & Mason. The demand for portrait sittings were as relentless as consultations with a modern Harley Street specialist (and similarly priced). Lawrence would undertake as many as five two-hour sittings a day, charging a 50% deposit. Consequently, much of his correspondence was concerned with the failure to deliver finished portraits, sometimes drawn out over many years. Lord Ellenborough once threatened to prosecute him in the courts for refusing to complete a painting of his wife. Another aggrieved client challenged Lawrence to a dawn duel in Hyde Park.

Alfred, one of Lawrence's most faithful assistants, slyly suggested that unfinished portraits had their own uses, especially with female clients of a certain age. "Some of them do come in a huff, but they always go away pleased, for my master brings out the picture, and says it needs only be altered in the dress, and then they think they are handsomer than ever. One old lady came the other day and asked to see a picture of her begun 20 years ago . . . 'Do finish it Sir Thomas, it is such an excellent likeness.'"

Much changed for Lawrence after 1810, and the death of his arch-rival, John Hoppner. He completed his first portrait of the Prince Regent (later George IV), became the official court painter, and moved into grandiose apartments in Russell Square. In 1814 he was commissioned by the prince to paint all the leaders of the wartime coalition against Napoleon. This took him intermittently to Paris, Vienna and Rome over a period of five years. He embarked on his huge, ambitious portraits of the soldiers, statesmen, monarchs, clerics and self-important princelings of the age, and these made him an international star. He was knighted, and began to move in exalted social circles, hobnobbing with the grand and wealthy (Prince Metternich was a particular favourite), and writing long, excited letters to Wolff about it all. He even painted the pope.

To this heady period belong the great series of "swagger portraits", as they were once dismissively called. Here Lawrence's natural sense of theatre and style strive for a new dimension of historic resonance. The commanding figure of Field Marshal Blücher (whose martial roar can practically be heard), or the quiet, resolute elegance of the Archduke Charles of Austria, both still swathed in the smoke of battle, celebrate a defining victory. However, the glamorised portraits of the prince regent frequently attracted mockery. The republican critic William Hazlitt drily observed that Lawrence had skilfully transformed the prince into a "well-fleshed" Adonis. "The portrait goes far beyond all that wigs, powders and pomatums have been able to effect over the last twenty years."

On his return home, Lawrence performed the same magical stagecraft on government figures such as the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and George Canning. Although sometimes undoubtedly stagey, they reflect the rhetoric of the regency, and serve their proper purpose as official "portraits of record", splendid and monumental. Lawrence's original, graphic genius wonderfully informs the best of these later works. It is fascinating to see how the fixed, hawk-like glare of his hypnotic portrait of Wellington has emerged from the softer and more psychologically subtle drawing of the same subject.

His old sense of freedom and daring was developed even more fully in his later portraits of women. He had previously shown the glowing sexual radiance of Frances Hawkins, the mistress of Lord Abercorn, shamelessly reflected in the loving glance of her illegitimate child and the panting of her large pet dog. Now he gave the pert, seductive charm of Lady Selina Meade, the arch amusement of the Princess Sophia, or the teasing melancholy of Rosamund Croker, a sumptuous life all of their own. The portrait of Margaret, Countess Blessington (originally a working girl like Emma Hamilton), is one of the most glorious, brazen pictures Lawrence ever painted. Byron, when he first met Blessington in Italy, instantly identified her as the subject of Lawrence's picture and the archetype of the English regency belle. All London was "raving" over it, and over her, the author of Don Juan noted appreciatively. Even better, she gave his own mistress, Countess Guiccioli, "a furious fit of Italian jealousy".

From this professional and social high point, the swift collapse of Lawrence's reputation after his death in 1830, partly as the result of Victorian prudery, is an interesting matter of social history as much as art history. The novelist Thackeray, for instance, ridiculed Lawrence's flashy values in Vanity Fair (1847), and attacked his female portraits as "tawdry". In the last couple of decades the art historian William Vaughan has derided him as a painter "in a state of permanent adolescence". It became a witticism to say his only successor was the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton.

But as we look at Lawrence now, it is worth remembering that the Americans have always loved him; and the French, have always seen him in the larger, historic perspective. When Lawrence first began to exhibit in Paris, towards the end of his career in the 1820s, he was greeted as one of the great, liberating harbingers of British romanticism, and awarded the Légion d'honneur. He was seen as part of the movement that overturned all the old restrictions of classicism: along with Byron's poetry, the experimental science of Sir Humphry Davy, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the landscapes of Constable. "The English manner enjoys a triumph in Paris," wrote the young Stendhal, "Mr Lawrence's name is immortal."

In the legendary "English" salons of 1824–7, Lawrence's pictures of women, and of children, took his viewers by storm. His ebullient picture of the Calmady children, in which the youngest girl is practically kicking out of the picture frame, suggested a new, uninhibited approach to childhood. His celebrated portrait of Charles William Lambton in scarlet velveteens was sometimes assumed to be an imaginary portrait of the dreaming, youthful Byron, the very soul of English romanticism, and was reproduced across Europe as such, and is still instantly recognisable today. If it is chocolate box, in this new age of austerity we should gratefully indulge.

Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 21 October to 23 January 2011. Guardian Extra members have a two for one ticket offer for the exhibition (guardian.co.uk/extra). www.npg.org.uk